By Geoff Fein
As the Navy incorporates open architecture into its ships and submarines, it will be vital to keep the sailors who operate sonar and combat systems up to date on the rapidly upgraded technologies, according to a Navy official.
One lesson the submarine force learned as it was incorporating the Acoustic Rapid COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) Insertion (ARCI) effort was making sure submariners got training on the same upgrades, Capt, Jim Stevens, tactical systems integration branch head, submarine warfare division, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“We were pushing technology so much down on the waterfront and not training people,” he said. “The training people were not getting the same rapid updates…ARCI… the same upgrades. That was bad.
“When you are faced with that problem you can stop pushing technology to the waterfront, but you don’t want to do that, or [you can] push the technology down to the training rooms as well. That’s what we ended up doing,” Stevens added.
Every homeport now has the Submarine Multi Mission Team Trainer (SMMTT). When a boat comes into its homeport, the crew can head to the SMMTT and ask for a specific build, for example, Advanced Processing Build (APB) 07 and Technical Insertion (TI) 06. SMMTT can be configured for APB 07 TI 06 and the crew can train on it, Stevens said, in a model with a lot of fidelity in an accurately modeled environment.
The big challenge right now, he added, is that in a squadron of six submarines, four of the boats have different versions of ARCI.
Stevens said the model has been tweaked so that should a submarine receive a technology refresh (and those occur every two years) it would be transparent to the operators, because there was no change in the operator machine interface (OMI).
Stevens is hoping the tweak has helped out. “The jury is still out.”
“The sonar chief now has to be familiar with all of the applications on his different versions of software and it’s a real challenge,” he said. “We realize that and we are trying to fix it.”
Operators are going through the SMMTT trainers every week. “That is something the XO strives to do…to get guys down to the trainer,” Steven said.
“What you want is to have a training system available so he can send his guys [and] get them trained up on their particular version of ARCI,” he added.
Stevens added there are also rules as to how close to deployment a new software system can be downloaded. “You want to make sure they are trained up and get the proper documentation.”
Another area of concern, Stevens noted, is with the testing community–the people who do independent evaluations for the government.
“I am referring to the formal DOT&E (Director of Operational Test & Evaluation) sort of testing,” he said.
While the fleet does test every version of software it gets and a decision is made on whether to install, Stevens said the problem lies in the development of these capabilities at such a rapid pace.
That has led to criticism that stuff is being deployed before it’s tested, he added. “We are working very closely with them to address their concerns.”
The Submarine Technical Requirements Group is a peer review group that gives thumbs up or down on whether a software application under development meets their needs.
“If the software application doesn’t fit what we want, we just send it back, because we know in two years I am going to have the processing power available. So maybe this version of the application doesn’t match now, but through this peer review group we have looking at the software we just say ‘it’s not ready for prime time yet, but come back in 18 months when the next generation of hardware processing is available and we will review it then,'” Stevens explained.
When the submarine force first ventured down the path of ARCI, they first tackled towed arrays, then sonar, and then the whole combat system, Stevens said. “We were able to learn.”
It was a matter of starting off small and going from there, he added.
“In my opinion you just can’t leap into it. You have to go into systems that you can do piecemeal. For example, we are looking at torpedoes now,” Stevens said. “Now with Moore’s law, you have to match your model with the system.”
Moore’s law describes how the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. It is used to describe the rate of technology refresh.
Because Moore’s law is about every 18 months to two years and having a torpedo maintenance due date (when the Navy brings in all its torpedoes) of every five years, the submarine force is looking at a model of providing a technology refresh every five years, Stevens explained. “You have to match your model with what you are doing.”
The submarine force will work on imaging systems next.
“There has been a tremendous revolution in digital imagery, so our latest version of our periscope has a Cannon camera strapped inside,” Stevens said. “It’s seizing the commercial side of the house and applying that. That’s where you get the affordability.”
The Integrated Submarine Imaging System (ISIS), built by Kollmorgen Electro Optical, provides all weather, visual, and electronic search, digital image management, indication, warning, and platform architecture interface capabilities for SSN 688, SSN 21, and SSGN class submarines, according to the company.
“What that allows us to do is bring that data right down into the whole federated architecture,” Stevens said. “Even more important, it is able to be upgraded on a routine basis, rather than buying a whole new periscope system every six years.”
With APB 07, the submarine force now has a whole new method of displaying information. Stevens said. “We are pretty excited about it.”
With APB 07, submariners have taken the sonar display and inside of that is the contact picture from the fire control system, he added.
“It is so visually powerful. It has cut by a half the performance [time] of a real submarine crew in a high contact environment,” Stevens said. “We took a crew and manned them up with the old version. It took them four hours or so to run this very difficult scenario.”
Stevens said the same operators were brought back a couple of months later and manned up with the new version. He said they were able to cut their performance time by two hours. “It was measurable performance improvement.”
The modification required no upgrades to hardware, Stevens added. “Just software. It came about because we have more processing.”
Stevens said the Navy plans to install the new capability about every four years for a particular boat. “We are doing it about as fast as we can. Submarines are high demand low-density platforms, there is a big demand for them. We can only take so many off line.”
SSNs and SSGNs will get the upgrade, he added.
“We are still looking at SSBNs and when is the right time to put them on the model,” Stevens said.